I drew against a blue moon deck in the finals ofan LGS tourney. Crytpic just makes the matchup feel hella bad and siding in metallic rebuke and swan song didn't help much. Anyone have any plan for this deck? Is it just like a 30/70 for us?
Anyone still running this? How’s it looking? Susurrus has stopped streaming and it’s not popular on twitch anymore - just wondering if it’s from The community’s ADD or if people have a bit more awareness of the build. You guys finding anything?
Anyone still running this? How’s it looking? Susurrus has stopped streaming and it’s not popular on twitch anymore - just wondering if it’s from The community’s ADD or if people have a bit more awareness of the build. You guys finding anything?
I’m currently still running it, but I don’t think you’re going to find too many people playing the deck, for a few reasons:
1) A large portion of the magic population hates prison decks. Not just playing against them, but even playing with them. They find them boring, tedious, or they just don’t like that style of magic.
2) The deck is fairly expensive. Chalices, EE, Opals, Bridges... the deck has a high cost of entry compared to many modern decks. Anyone who is having to pick up most of this from scratch might be incredibly discouraged to even try building the deck.
3) The pieces of the deck don’t translate in to other decks very well. Sure, you’ve got bridges and Chalices, so you can play other prison decks, but aside from that, the cards in the deck don’t really lend themselves towards building another full deck. Aside from prison, I think you’d be closest to affinity, and that’s just because you have Opals, Grids, and Welding Jars - still a long way from actually building the entire deck. The fact that the pieces don’t lend themselves to many other decks, along with the high cost of the deck, is a huge deterrent for anyone that plays magic on any sort of budget.
4) The deck is tough. It’s not necessarily tough to goldfish it, but if you want to perform well with this deck you have to have a pretty good knowledge of the meta, and from what I’ve experienced, even non meta decks. You need to know all their win conditions, their possible hate cards, etc... This is the part of the deck that I really enjoy. Everything is a puzzle, but the pieces aren’t laid out on the table for you - you have to blindly figure out the last few pieces with the rest of the information presented to you. To sum it up, the deck is mentally taxing, not just while you are playing it, but even prior to taking it to an event.
With all that being said, I’ve been having tons of success with the deck. I’m playing the classic winning deck, almost card for card, though with a few small changes.
My meta has a lot of burn, so I’ve gone back to sun droplets in the board. I’ve also cut one of the fetchlands to make room for another Tectonic Edge. We’ve got 2 tron players and 2 Titanshift players at my local store, and the second Tec Edge really helps in those matchups.
There’s a lot of possibilities for this deck. You can adjust and fine tune it for just about anything. I find the Jeskai Control matchup to be fairly rough, but the Tec Edges and Academy Ruins have always been the key to winning the game.
I’m certainly not as experience with the deck as the creator, but I built the deck almost immediately after I saw it, and have been loving every second of playing it.
Yeah, it’s definitely a niche deck which I think is a good thing.
I think the control matchups are pretty good for the most part because of the land desteuction element. I’m definitely going to try that change, the number of fetches seems awkward and honestly so does his cascade bluffs. A point of life is usually not the thing that kills you, and being able to EE for more with spire of industry has come in handy a lot for me.
After more thought on what I think is the worst matchup, blue moon - I think the main fight is over blood moon. That we’re the control deck and having the nonbasics gives us inevitability.
I have been playing swan song in the SB, and I’m thinking of making room for a surgical or two for the tron/valakut matchups.
It's mostly pretty stock, but there were a couple of things I wanted to discuss, so thought I'd have it here for ease of reference.
First up is counter spells like Metallic Rebuke and Counterbalance. After considering it for a while, at the moment I am of the position that they are not the answer we are looking for. It seems like the main reason people want to have access to them are Cryptic Command, Fracturing Gust and Stony Silence. I'd like to posit the idea that we already have answers for these cards in Spellskite, Welding Jar and Academy Ruins, and so we don't need to dilute the main plan to combat them.
Spellskite is amazing in this deck. I ended up cutting Padeem because for all intents and purposes, we're kind of already running 4 mini-Padeems with the 2 mana artifact creature. They come out way faster, they don't clog up the hand when we're trying to dump cards for Ensnaring Bridge and they do a great job of soaking up shatters and bounces. It's only 1 more mana to recur a Spellskite with Academy Ruins than it is to cast Padeem and we can do that as many times as we want. I think by shifting the importance of getting as many copies of this card onto the battlefield as you can against Cryptic Command decks is a fair solution. Couple it with Grafdigger's Cage and you've got yourself a situation where we can recur our answer and they can't recur their threat.
The second part to the counterspells point is Welding Jar. I think this is our answer to Fracturing Gust, not trying to stop it. We generally only need to keep a single bridge and a Torpor Orb on the battlefield to cut out most green decks, and so just keeping those alive, letting everything else die and rebuilding with Academy Ruins (welding jars first, duplicate lock pieces second, win conditions last) usually allows the game to carry on as it always did. Again, it's a matter of slightly shifting the strategy of play against these decks to getting Academy Ruins and as many welding jars on the table as quickly as possible that can help to solve the problem, rather than adding new cards in.
Shatterstorm is a big problem. If people ever start playing this card, then that is bad. I guess we cross this bridge when we come to it.
The final counterspell point is Stoney Silence. Come off it, we're playing Aether Grid. Quirky 3 mana enchantment that turns it into Stoney Violence. PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW!!!!
Ok the next thing I wanted to talk about is what would be better than counterspells. Pyroclasm. Hooley dooley this card is mad as a cut snake. Last night it won me 2 matches (elves and affinity) by being able to play it on turn 2 (or even 1 with mox opal!) against extremely fast starts. They'd dumped their hands by that point and were now playing the game as slow as me. It's also absolutely fantastic at sweeping off troublesome Eidolons and Swiftspears that can get damage around/under the bridge. The fetch land build, plus running an extra Spire of Industry makes this card more consistent. Having said all this, I've only run it once now, so needs more testing! My main issue with it at the moment is that I think I've had to cut a Sorcerous Spyglass from the board to run the 3 copies necessary to draw it early, and I don't like doing that. Spyglass is a very, very, very good card in this deck.
So what are your thoughts and feels? Is there anything I'm glossing over in my reasoning?
I haven't played this deck for 4 weeks and... oh boy I must tell you that you really need to understand the whole thing well to pick up wins with it.
I still wish there were some good youtube resources on this deck. I wish the deck creators would try to pick up some youtube revenue instead of just streaming. I've tweaked my deck to deal with Tron as I find it's coming more prevalent.
@youwillnowexplode I’m playing counters because everyone started playing shatterstorm in my meta, and while this deck is great it does allow your opponent unfettered access to a large portion of their deck, so I was getting shatterstorms cast against me multiple times in a tournament. That’s my reasoning for having them.
I like your padeem reasoning, now that you mention it he’s never been lights out for me in the post-spellskite iteration.
Not sure about the pyroclasms. I don’t feel like it does what the deck wants to do, but please keep testing and if it keeps being amazing I’ll definitely try a few out.
No Deck is an easy win for this deck. I've played deck's with easy wins (they are generally quick and fun). But I've never got an easy win with this one. They are all grinds (hence the grindfather name).
the deck just plays on its own... I think what Youwillnowexplode states is just true... no elendras no counters, just Spellskites - I also thinking lately the same about Padeem. while the card just is fantastic I think it can be other card like more defense grids or Aether..
the only kind of decks I am having issues with are Control decks - 1st time was Blue moon thats why I changed to the last iteration of Mr Coyle (http://tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=27557&iddeck=221253) from there I just switched 1 cascade by 1 spire... nothing else. and the last control game was just UW with spheres / cryptics / counters / disenchant from side and silence - the guy even played Espercharm which destroys my Aether grids...
how the hell do you win vs this strategy? I mean you just play proactively and land ***** of cards and give the opp. the option to win you via snap??
I've been thinking in just try to add space to play more Defense grids but I really would like to have anti stony in the form of decay - sure sometimes just Aether wins you the game but others just suck. do you leave Chalices?
please I'd like to have other opinons on this - I am trying to figure ut some kind of approach vs this...
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Thank god for this card. Helps vs valakut/tron so so much. I think this really buys us a lot of wiggle room. So happy this card got printed.
Secondly:
I went 3-1 in a win a box, i lost to blue living end. Game one I crushed him. Game two he just played out spinxes into my ensnaring bridge. I had a spellskite, a whir, bottled cloister, a chalice on two for the hurkyl’s recalls in his hand and I felt like I had a pretty good shot at winning the game. During his upkeep in response to my bottled cloister trigger he hurkyl’s recalled me, stifled the chalice trigger, I whirred for witchbane orb to counter recall by giving myself hexproof and he crypric counters and bounces my bottled cloister. That was a bad bad bad beat. In game three I was basically too tilted to do anything.
Blood moon and crypric decks are very tough for us to beat. I wish coyle would come out of hiding so I could pick his brain on the topic. Defense grid seems good and aether grids seem pretty good. I’ll bet there’s just some big dumb card that can crush them. Totally open to some
Card archivists weighing in.
Now that big mana decks get a very relevant SB card I think we can call cryptic public enemy #1
for control i've been trying out uba mask in my side as well as bringing back the possessed portal we used to play along with 2 defense grids and i'm also testing out thopter spy network to see if that has any potential in the matchup, thoughts?
yeah I've been thinking in boseiju also! but usually UW decks pack lot of antilands and well the other problematic matchup - blood moon is nonsense... uniquely vs UWR could work...
not sure if Possesed portal would work as it is just expensive (I like the card!)... the problem should be to resolve a whir... which is likely the most in the so few cards they are worry about...
this is likely the thing I miss from other tezz build that has the option of Discard plus threat and thopter inevitability in 1st game.
this deck has just 3 relevant cards vs control which is crucible and spyglass/EE but the last 2 cards are just not a threat...
the problem about silence is that invalidates skite and i hate that. I really would **** to have activated skites/jar options vs disenthant/spheres...
So I am looking at 2 options:
- increase the number of Defense Grid - I'll start on 3 and lets see if 4 are ok. Question: in resp to a spell, If I cast whir to defense is it countered if is my turn? but the problem of defense is again the same - defense in order to counter what? so also increase aether/crucible...
- radically change the manabase to support decay/discard - like UB Tezz because decay to moon/silence/sphere is a good thing! and maybe visions?
EDIT: Saw Uba mask... no sure if Defense is just better...
EDIT 2: any card like Dwarven Blastminer in modern?
Onions?
@boomforest I do like how Alpine Moon could give us some options to hate out troublesome lands without hurting us. I'm super interested in testing it. Against Tron it seems meh because we fix them on green to get it Nature's Claimed then they still go off. Besides we're pretty good against Tron anyways. I can see this having more utility against cavern of souls or man lands, Valakut maybe, things like that.
Cleansing nova is bad news for us. I think we prey on this effect being marginal.
I think Alpine Moon is going to be really good. In conjunction with sphere and our existing interaction with tron it puts even more pressure on their nature’s claims which is a 2-3 of at most. I’m more excited for this than sphere.
I hadn’t even thought of the goblins! Hahahahaha. This is why I love core sets, they can flavorlessly fix the unfun decks in modern as the problems pop up.
Yeah, this card is great for us. People are saying it's worse than blood moon, but we can't play blood moon. I think it's existence will push tron back down to ladder. People are saying that its fixing will help tron get the colored mana they need for nature's claim. I have never seen tron not get the colored mana it needs, and there's no such thing as a good sb hate card that doesn't get trumped by their anti-hate card. You play cards for the possibility of the opponent not answering, or making them stumble long enough to get a real advantage. As a lover of artifacts and tezzeret, I can sadly recall of many many (many) games that stony silence ended where I didn't see my 2-3 copies of enchantment removal.
I think I'll start off playing a few for tron/valakut - but I'm interested in seeing if amulet of safekeeping can help the valakut matchup with a whir for it in response to a scapeshift/titan.
I've loved that card for a long time, and I think it could really shut down control decks in a way that we desperately need. It also prevents a player from loading up on a bunch of pieces they need to dismantle our board-state and pouncing at the worst possible second.
With the rise of KCI, I'm wondering if surgical extraction is a good SB card. But we really have no meaningful interaction with KCI, and as you may have already experienced there is no board state they cannot blow up once they start their engine. Splash damage is it helps with big mana matchups by being able to surgical/ghost quarter.
Susurrus was on revoker for a second but that deck plays mainboard pyrite spellbombs and engineered explosives x4, I just don’t think a creature beased permanent is going to be very helpful.
Wait, I really misunderstood Uba, does it read: If the exiled card is not played the exact turn it is exiled then just remains exiled until the end of the game regaardless uba leaves play or not?
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I can see that argument for Alpine Moon. I guess the real question is what do we take out to make room for it in the sb? I'm assuming 1 or both side board chalices since they are the least impactful from the board. Same question for amulet, WotC gave me too many new toys!
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I’m currently still running it, but I don’t think you’re going to find too many people playing the deck, for a few reasons:
1) A large portion of the magic population hates prison decks. Not just playing against them, but even playing with them. They find them boring, tedious, or they just don’t like that style of magic.
2) The deck is fairly expensive. Chalices, EE, Opals, Bridges... the deck has a high cost of entry compared to many modern decks. Anyone who is having to pick up most of this from scratch might be incredibly discouraged to even try building the deck.
3) The pieces of the deck don’t translate in to other decks very well. Sure, you’ve got bridges and Chalices, so you can play other prison decks, but aside from that, the cards in the deck don’t really lend themselves towards building another full deck. Aside from prison, I think you’d be closest to affinity, and that’s just because you have Opals, Grids, and Welding Jars - still a long way from actually building the entire deck. The fact that the pieces don’t lend themselves to many other decks, along with the high cost of the deck, is a huge deterrent for anyone that plays magic on any sort of budget.
4) The deck is tough. It’s not necessarily tough to goldfish it, but if you want to perform well with this deck you have to have a pretty good knowledge of the meta, and from what I’ve experienced, even non meta decks. You need to know all their win conditions, their possible hate cards, etc... This is the part of the deck that I really enjoy. Everything is a puzzle, but the pieces aren’t laid out on the table for you - you have to blindly figure out the last few pieces with the rest of the information presented to you. To sum it up, the deck is mentally taxing, not just while you are playing it, but even prior to taking it to an event.
With all that being said, I’ve been having tons of success with the deck. I’m playing the classic winning deck, almost card for card, though with a few small changes.
My meta has a lot of burn, so I’ve gone back to sun droplets in the board. I’ve also cut one of the fetchlands to make room for another Tectonic Edge. We’ve got 2 tron players and 2 Titanshift players at my local store, and the second Tec Edge really helps in those matchups.
There’s a lot of possibilities for this deck. You can adjust and fine tune it for just about anything. I find the Jeskai Control matchup to be fairly rough, but the Tec Edges and Academy Ruins have always been the key to winning the game.
I’m certainly not as experience with the deck as the creator, but I built the deck almost immediately after I saw it, and have been loving every second of playing it.
I think the control matchups are pretty good for the most part because of the land desteuction element. I’m definitely going to try that change, the number of fetches seems awkward and honestly so does his cascade bluffs. A point of life is usually not the thing that kills you, and being able to EE for more with spire of industry has come in handy a lot for me.
After more thought on what I think is the worst matchup, blue moon - I think the main fight is over blood moon. That we’re the control deck and having the nonbasics gives us inevitability.
I have been playing swan song in the SB, and I’m thinking of making room for a surgical or two for the tron/valakut matchups.
1 Academy Ruins
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Inventors' Fair
1 Ipnu Rivulet
5 Island
4 Polluted Delta
1 Scalding Tarn
2 Spire of Industry
1 Steam Vents
1 Tectonic Edge
4 Tolaria West
Artifacts
1 Bottled Cloister
2 Chalice of the Void
1 Crucible of Worlds
3 Engineered Explosives
4 Ensnaring Bridge
3 Expedition Map
1 Grafdigger's Cage
4 Mishra's Bauble
4 Mox Opal
2 Pyrite Spellbomb
2 Sorcerous Spyglass
1 Tormod's Crypt
3 Welding Jar
4 Whir of Invention
1 Witchbane Orb
1 Tezzeret the Seeker
Enchantments
1 Ghirapur Aether Grid
2 Chalice of the Void
1 Damping Sphere
1 Defense Grid
1 Ghirapur Aether Grid
3 Pyroclasm
1 Sorcerous Spyglass
4 Spellskite
1 Torpor Orb
1 Welding Jar
It's mostly pretty stock, but there were a couple of things I wanted to discuss, so thought I'd have it here for ease of reference.
First up is counter spells like Metallic Rebuke and Counterbalance. After considering it for a while, at the moment I am of the position that they are not the answer we are looking for. It seems like the main reason people want to have access to them are Cryptic Command, Fracturing Gust and Stony Silence. I'd like to posit the idea that we already have answers for these cards in Spellskite, Welding Jar and Academy Ruins, and so we don't need to dilute the main plan to combat them.
Spellskite is amazing in this deck. I ended up cutting Padeem because for all intents and purposes, we're kind of already running 4 mini-Padeems with the 2 mana artifact creature. They come out way faster, they don't clog up the hand when we're trying to dump cards for Ensnaring Bridge and they do a great job of soaking up shatters and bounces. It's only 1 more mana to recur a Spellskite with Academy Ruins than it is to cast Padeem and we can do that as many times as we want. I think by shifting the importance of getting as many copies of this card onto the battlefield as you can against Cryptic Command decks is a fair solution. Couple it with Grafdigger's Cage and you've got yourself a situation where we can recur our answer and they can't recur their threat.
The second part to the counterspells point is Welding Jar. I think this is our answer to Fracturing Gust, not trying to stop it. We generally only need to keep a single bridge and a Torpor Orb on the battlefield to cut out most green decks, and so just keeping those alive, letting everything else die and rebuilding with Academy Ruins (welding jars first, duplicate lock pieces second, win conditions last) usually allows the game to carry on as it always did. Again, it's a matter of slightly shifting the strategy of play against these decks to getting Academy Ruins and as many welding jars on the table as quickly as possible that can help to solve the problem, rather than adding new cards in.
Shatterstorm is a big problem. If people ever start playing this card, then that is bad. I guess we cross this bridge when we come to it.
The final counterspell point is Stoney Silence. Come off it, we're playing Aether Grid. Quirky 3 mana enchantment that turns it into Stoney Violence. PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW!!!!
Ok the next thing I wanted to talk about is what would be better than counterspells. Pyroclasm. Hooley dooley this card is mad as a cut snake. Last night it won me 2 matches (elves and affinity) by being able to play it on turn 2 (or even 1 with mox opal!) against extremely fast starts. They'd dumped their hands by that point and were now playing the game as slow as me. It's also absolutely fantastic at sweeping off troublesome Eidolons and Swiftspears that can get damage around/under the bridge. The fetch land build, plus running an extra Spire of Industry makes this card more consistent. Having said all this, I've only run it once now, so needs more testing! My main issue with it at the moment is that I think I've had to cut a Sorcerous Spyglass from the board to run the 3 copies necessary to draw it early, and I don't like doing that. Spyglass is a very, very, very good card in this deck.
So what are your thoughts and feels? Is there anything I'm glossing over in my reasoning?
I haven't played this deck for 4 weeks and... oh boy I must tell you that you really need to understand the whole thing well to pick up wins with it.
I still wish there were some good youtube resources on this deck. I wish the deck creators would try to pick up some youtube revenue instead of just streaming. I've tweaked my deck to deal with Tron as I find it's coming more prevalent.
I like your padeem reasoning, now that you mention it he’s never been lights out for me in the post-spellskite iteration.
Not sure about the pyroclasms. I don’t feel like it does what the deck wants to do, but please keep testing and if it keeps being amazing I’ll definitely try a few out.
No Deck is an easy win for this deck. I've played deck's with easy wins (they are generally quick and fun). But I've never got an easy win with this one. They are all grinds (hence the grindfather name).
I played the deck again to a decent 3-1!
the deck just plays on its own... I think what Youwillnowexplode states is just true... no elendras no counters, just Spellskites - I also thinking lately the same about Padeem. while the card just is fantastic I think it can be other card like more defense grids or Aether..
the only kind of decks I am having issues with are Control decks - 1st time was Blue moon thats why I changed to the last iteration of Mr Coyle (http://tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=27557&iddeck=221253) from there I just switched 1 cascade by 1 spire... nothing else. and the last control game was just UW with spheres / cryptics / counters / disenchant from side and silence - the guy even played Espercharm which destroys my Aether grids...
how the hell do you win vs this strategy? I mean you just play proactively and land ***** of cards and give the opp. the option to win you via snap??
I've been thinking in just try to add space to play more Defense grids but I really would like to have anti stony in the form of decay - sure sometimes just Aether wins you the game but others just suck. do you leave Chalices?
please I'd like to have other opinons on this - I am trying to figure ut some kind of approach vs this...
ALPINE MOON!
Thank god for this card. Helps vs valakut/tron so so much. I think this really buys us a lot of wiggle room. So happy this card got printed.
Secondly:
I went 3-1 in a win a box, i lost to blue living end. Game one I crushed him. Game two he just played out spinxes into my ensnaring bridge. I had a spellskite, a whir, bottled cloister, a chalice on two for the hurkyl’s recalls in his hand and I felt like I had a pretty good shot at winning the game. During his upkeep in response to my bottled cloister trigger he hurkyl’s recalled me, stifled the chalice trigger, I whirred for witchbane orb to counter recall by giving myself hexproof and he crypric counters and bounces my bottled cloister. That was a bad bad bad beat. In game three I was basically too tilted to do anything.
Blood moon and crypric decks are very tough for us to beat. I wish coyle would come out of hiding so I could pick his brain on the topic. Defense grid seems good and aether grids seem pretty good. I’ll bet there’s just some big dumb card that can crush them. Totally open to some
Card archivists weighing in.
Now that big mana decks get a very relevant SB card I think we can call cryptic public enemy #1
not sure if Possesed portal would work as it is just expensive (I like the card!)... the problem should be to resolve a whir... which is likely the most in the so few cards they are worry about...
this is likely the thing I miss from other tezz build that has the option of Discard plus threat and thopter inevitability in 1st game.
this deck has just 3 relevant cards vs control which is crucible and spyglass/EE but the last 2 cards are just not a threat...
the problem about silence is that invalidates skite and i hate that. I really would **** to have activated skites/jar options vs disenthant/spheres...
So I am looking at 2 options:
- increase the number of Defense Grid - I'll start on 3 and lets see if 4 are ok. Question: in resp to a spell, If I cast whir to defense is it countered if is my turn? but the problem of defense is again the same - defense in order to counter what? so also increase aether/crucible...
- radically change the manabase to support decay/discard - like UB Tezz because decay to moon/silence/sphere is a good thing! and maybe visions?
EDIT: Saw Uba mask... no sure if Defense is just better...
EDIT 2: any card like Dwarven Blastminer in modern?
Onions?
I think Alpine Moon is going to be really good. In conjunction with sphere and our existing interaction with tron it puts even more pressure on their nature’s claims which is a 2-3 of at most. I’m more excited for this than sphere.
Yeah, this card is great for us. People are saying it's worse than blood moon, but we can't play blood moon. I think it's existence will push tron back down to ladder. People are saying that its fixing will help tron get the colored mana they need for nature's claim. I have never seen tron not get the colored mana it needs, and there's no such thing as a good sb hate card that doesn't get trumped by their anti-hate card. You play cards for the possibility of the opponent not answering, or making them stumble long enough to get a real advantage. As a lover of artifacts and tezzeret, I can sadly recall of many many (many) games that stony silence ended where I didn't see my 2-3 copies of enchantment removal.
I think I'll start off playing a few for tron/valakut - but I'm interested in seeing if amulet of safekeeping can help the valakut matchup with a whir for it in response to a scapeshift/titan.
Also great call on
Uba Mask
I've loved that card for a long time, and I think it could really shut down control decks in a way that we desperately need. It also prevents a player from loading up on a bunch of pieces they need to dismantle our board-state and pouncing at the worst possible second.